MAHA, Nationalist Social Reproduction, and the Politics of Maternal Mobilization

The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement, led by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and situated within the second Trump administration, has mobilized public concern about chronic disease, ultraprocessed foods, and environmental chemicals. In this talk, based on a new, work-in-progress research project, I examine how MAHA's political discourse invokes social reproduction, understood as the activities, relationships, and responsibilities involved in the maintenance of life on a daily basis and intergenerationally. Drawing on a critical discourse analysis of official MAHA policy documents, press conferences, and promotional videos, I show how MAHA constructs children as vulnerable and exploited by a corrupt system captured by corporate interests and positions chronic disease as an existential threat to national survival and military readiness.  MAHA furthermore mobilizes mothers as a key political constituency. I situate these findings at the intersection of two literatures: scholarship on precautionary consumption, natural mothering, and the individualization of risk, along with research on far-right movements that mobilize social reproduction anxieties for nationalist ends. I argue that MAHA is a mechanism through which Trumpism colonizes discourses of public health and social reproduction. Social reproduction politics are therefore not inherently progressive. When divorced from feminist analysis and linked to nationalist anxieties about collective futures, they can serve authoritarian and exclusionary projects.

Format

• Present and Online